In 1920-1921, representatives of the Red Navy landed in the Gilani port city of Anzali, inaugurating an alliance with the Jangali forces of Mirza Kuchek Khan and establishing the Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran (SSRI), a short-lived exclave marked by tensions between its communist and non-communist leadership. Within weeks of its establishment, programmatic tensions split the constituents of the SSRI, forcing them to navigate incongruent political visions and the uncertain functions of the project. Had the revolutionaries fought for Iranian constitutionalism, or for global socialism?
When questioning the revolutionaries’ internal dissensions, self-authored memoirs constitute an important source base, allowing both Jangalis and communists to speak relatively unfiltered through the reports of consular and state observers. Previously, the accounts of Ebrāhīm Fakhrā’ī and Grīgor Yaqīkīyān served as the foundational memoirs for study of the SSRI, informing English-, Persian-, and Russian-language narratives of the movement even after the opening of former Soviet archives in 1991. In recent decades, however, a number of new and original accounts have come to light, including those of Ḥosayn Farnīyā and Ṣādeq Kūchakpūr. By placing all of these memoirs in dialogue, this research will ask how the Jangali veterans negotiated not only the political boundaries separating them from the mainstream of the communists, but also their conceptions of Sovietism, and especially its incongruity with the Jangali programs articulated from 1915 to 1920. In doing so, it asks how political and ideological divides compounded and overlapped in the aftermath of the SSRI’s establishment, and how they ultimately contributed to the collapse of the revolution even prior to the withdrawal of Soviet state support in 1921.
